What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  I take another deep breath and continue. “Although most commonly found in pill form, Flunitrazepam can be crushed, put into liquid, and ingested on food.” I stop again and lick my lips, then add a little commentary, if only to punctuate the obvious. “Any food,” I say. “Like pizza.”

  Right now, there’s a fat little chef standing next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, drawn onto a pizza box. He’s having a good old belly laugh at our expense. The thing is, whatever he’s laughing at isn’t funny. It’s not funny at all.

  “Shit,” hisses Anders under his breath. Then he rolls his hands one over the other in hopes that I’ll continue so he has words to hang onto.

  “Seven to ten times stronger than Valium, Flunitrazepam, or Rohypnol, takes effect fifteen to twenty minutes after it is ingested and can last anywhere from four hours to twelve hours, depending on how much is taken. While sedated, most people don’t remember a thing.”

  I stop for a moment. That part isn’t true. I remember black eyes. I remember sheep crying. I even remember a blur of activity and voices and a searing pain in my arm.

  I remember all those things, all mixed up and confused.

  “And?” Anders says.

  “Known as the date-rape drug, those under its influence suffer partial amnesia. They are unable to remember certain events that they experience. It is mostly used so victims won’t clearly recall an assault or an assailant, or the events surrounding any given situation.”

  I stop reading, but only because Myers retches again. I’m no longer grossed out by the sound. After all, it explains so much. When I’m sure he’s through, I read the last few lines slowly and clearly. “Flunitrazepam use causes several adverse effects including episodic amnesia, brain fog, confusion, and . . . and gastrointestinal disturbances.”

  I finish and slowly shut Marcy’s laptop. I don’t want to look at it anymore. I truly want to forget.

  “That’s messed up,” she says. “Who would want to do that to us?”

  Anders shakes his head. No words will form on his lips.

  “Who brought the pizza?” I ask. It’s more than a valid question. It’s a crucial one. “I don’t remember much of anything after going over to Myers’ house after school.” Both Anders and Marcy look up at me. “His mother was baking cookies for his boy scout troop. She started screaming at us so we left.”

  They both nod. Mrs. Myers screaming is normal.

  “What about you?” Marcy says. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Anders. She sits there on the counter, her curls framing her beautiful face.

  There is an uncomfortable silence. In that moment, which feels like an hour long but probably only lasts seconds, Anders looks up and realizes that Marcy is talking to him. He takes a deep breath and continues staring at the floor. “There was a game right after school—us against Mount Tom Regional. We won. I came home and took a shower. My mom was there. She said she was going out and told me not to wait up.”

  I snort a little.

  Anders levels a piercing gaze in my direction.

  “My parents were here when I came home from school yesterday,” Marcy says. “We talked about college next year and my applications.” She lowers her voice a little as though the next part is a secret. “Then we talked about what’s going to happen next summer.”

  She stares hard at Anders when she tells us that, but he doesn’t even flinch.

  As we sit there in shared silence, the sounds of the house creaking and Myers flushing the toilet again and again, big black eyes blink in my memory and I force myself to look into them. They’re huge, like saucers, and light is glinting off their slightly curved surface. There are a million secrets behind those eyes and all I want to do is take both hands and press my thumbs into them as hard as I can to retrieve just one.

  I want to know what they’re looking at.

  I need to know.

  When the phone rings again, my skin jumps right off of my bones, desperate to run away.

  I know the feeling. I truly do.

  48

  WE’VE LET THE answering machine take phone calls all day—desperate, awkward, mournful messages from people whose brains are about to break. This call, however, is different.

  As soon as I realize who it is on the other end, talking through the answering machine, I scramble to my feet, grab the closest receiver, and pick it up.

  “Hello?” says a familiar voice.

  Goosebumps pop out on my arm.

  “Take it,” I mouth to Marcy in exaggerated pantomime. She shakes her head no. She wants nothing to do with this particular phone call. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a choice. “You have to.”

  I hit the button on the phone that says ‘speaker’ and listen as a disembodied voice comes into being right in the middle of the three of us.

  “What the hell?” Tate Cole says. “Hello?”

  Marcy has to say something. Saying nothing isn’t an option any more. “Hello?” she barely whispers.

  “Twinsy,” he purrs like a cat who knows that the baby rabbit in its mouth isn’t going to live to squeak another day. Marcy cringes. We all do. Calling her ‘Twinsy’ is a statement of fact. He’s Tate and she’s Marcy, and although they shared the same womb seventeen and a half years ago, they share nothing anymore except two parents who are down at the Indian casino for the weekend. That, and the brand new stigma of being from the same town as Dr. Viktor Pavlovich.

  Unfortunately, I think Tate doesn’t think of the latter as a stigma. He probably thinks it’s cool.

  “Shit,” she mouths.

  “Well you’re still breathing,” Tate says as smooth as silk, every bit the psychopath we all know him to be. “That answers question numero uno.” I get the overwhelming sense that a venomous snake is getting ready to slither out of the phone and kiss Marcy’s lips with a forked tongue.

  “What do you mean?” Marcy says.

  “Thought you and the rents might have eaten some bad pepperoni and wound up dead or something,” he sighs so nonchalantly that he might as well be having a conversation on the veranda at the Meadowfield Country Club, sipping a Shirley Temple because none of us are old enough to drink.

  “That’s not nice,” says Marcy. Everything about her is the opposite of Tate. She’s light and he’s dark. She’s sane. He’s a lunatic.

  “I never said I was nice,” he sneers. “Besides, my bank account and the knees on my jeans both took a beating this past year. The least you could do is stop breathing.”

  Marcy shakes her head. “I don’t . . . what?” she says.

  “Nothing,” says Tate, and my whole body goes rigid. His single word response means far more than nothing. It damn well means something and my teeth start grinding together.

  ‘Thought you might have eaten some bad pepperoni.’

  ‘Eaten some bad pepperoni.’

  ‘Bad pepperoni.’

  Everything gels. Well, not everything, but one thing becomes crystal clear. Somehow, from an hour away, in a nuthouse for kids who only have call-out hours twice a day, Tate somehow managed to get us to eat a drugged pizza.

  The idea makes no sense, but it makes perfect sense.

  My lip curls.

  As I begin to seethe and my triangle starts sending waves of pain washing up my arm, Myers stumbles into the room. His hair is sticking up in all directions and his skin is papery and pale. His eyes flutter a little. He’s still messed up. I know now that there were drugs on the pizza. The four of us were dosed yesterday around dinner time. Myers was dosed again today around noon, but there were only two small pieces left. We ate the bulk of it last night and then forgot.

  Everything.

  “Wha . . .” Myers begins but all three of us instinctively throw our fingers up to our mouths and make the universal sign for quiet. It’s like we’re
in the library at school, and Ms. French, the overly-endowed librarian with the ass that guys like Grafton Applewhite talk about for hours, has invoked a silent study and we’re breaking the rules.

  Myers’ eyes grow wide when he realizes who’s on the phone. Instead of opening his mouth again, he grabs his left elbow with his right hand and lets his mouth fall into an upside down grin.

  “What do you want, Tate? Mom and Dad aren’t home,” Marcy finally says. She stares at the pizza box when she talks, her eyes round and glistening underneath the kitchen lights and understanding creeping into her brain through her ear.

  “Well that sucks,” he hisses. “I suppose they’re breathing, too?”

  Marcy’s forehead creases.

  ‘Why . . . why wouldn’t they be . . . what?”

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Tate growls. “I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “But you think it,” he says.

  Marcy sniffles a little. “I don’t want to fight, Tate.” As she’s talking, I look up at the clock. It’s now after 6pm. Call-out hours.

  “I do,” he says. I can hear Tate’s antagonism through the phone. He hasn’t changed—not one bit. I can only hope that once he leaves Bellingham he’ll find another place to live that’s far away from sharp objects.

  Marcy closes her eyes and bites her lip. As my nostrils begin to flair, a pitiful thought surfaces. It’s pitiful because we live in Meadowfield where everything is supposed to be perfect.

  The thought is this: What’s worse? Myers and his fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a mother, Anders with his serial dater of a mom, Beryl and her apathy, or the thing that is Marcy’s brother that she will never, ever be able to quit? He’s literally half of her.

  “Tate . . .” she begins, but he cuts her off.

  “I got a message that someone called,” he sneers. His tone only accentuates the fact that I hate his smarmy voice. I hate everything about him.

  “What?” whispers Marcy. She doesn’t know I called The Bellingham School. She doesn’t know I talked to an epic dick named Eddie Bick.

  Then Tate takes my hate for him and makes it that much worse by sliding a verbal knife effortlessly between Marcy’s ribs and gutting her on the spot.

  “I got a message that my . . . uh . . . brother . . . uh . . . Mark called,” says Tate, relishing every word that is coming out of his mouth. “I don’t know about you, but I found that interesting.”

  49

  “ASSHOLE,” HISSES Anders. His words are loud and clear. Our moratorium on silence is shattered and Marcy puts one hand to her mouth as though she’s the one who uttered profanity, not him.

  “Who’s that?” snaps Tate. “Who’s with you?”

  “Freaking dirt bag,” Anders continues, like any of us could stop him even if we tried.

  “I know who that is,” whispers Tate Cole through the phone. He might as well be the devil. That’s who he sounds like. “Stephenson, right? Twinsy talks about you on visiting days. Not that I get very many visits.”

  “Stop,” says Marcy. “Please.” I don’t know if she’s talking to Tate or to Anders or to both of them.

  Tate ignores her. “So tell me, Anders. You screwing my twin yet? The way I hear it, you’ve been wanting that piece of ass for a while now.”

  Myers looks confused and a gray shadow passes across his face. Behind that shadow comes a moment of recognition where he suddenly understands that what he’s hearing is the truth, although up until this morning, we all thought Marcy was the one who wanted Anders, not the other way around.

  Like Barry Kupperman snorted back at The Stumps, through blood, snot and laughter: ‘Now this. This makes so much sense.’

  In a flash, Anders is on his feet, his fists curled into cruel weapons. The problem is, there’s nothing around but us to be the object of his wrath.

  “Shut up,” he barks at the invisible voice.

  “Not that I blame you,” continues Tate, sitting at some remote phone in another part of the state. “After all, we’re both kind of . . . hot . . . in our own ways.”

  Suddenly, Anders turns around and punches one of the white kitchen cabinets. It’s not made of dry wall, so he doesn’t rip open a hole. Instead, the wood splits with a loud crack. He pulls back and punches it again, this time leaving red dabs on the white surface.

  Marcy yelps.

  Myers says nothing. As for me, my own brand of anger bubbles to the surface and pours out of me in a torrent.

  “How did you do it?” I blurt out. My words stream from me louder than I intend. Myers jumps and starts to cry, but I think he’s mostly crying because he isn’t quite sure what’s going on. He’s still drugged.

  “What the hell? Are you having a party?” Tate growls through the speaker phone.

  “How did you do it, you sick fuck?” I bellow again.

  This time, the person on the other end of the phone, sitting at The Bellingham School, probably being woefully unattended to by a lowlife mental health counselor named Eddie Bick, makes a connection.

  “Is that you, King Kahn?” he says, the words crawling out of his mouth like spiders. King Kahn is what he used to call me because he couldn’t come up with a better fat slur than that. All he could say was that I was as big as an ape.

  “I called your school,” I blurt out. “I said I was Mark. I wanted to know if you somehow got loose. No one wants a waste of space like you set free.”

  He laughs through the speaker phone, much the same way that a twisted villain in a cartoon laughs at the hero he’s tormenting. “Owie, owie,” he cries through his laughter. “You’re hurting my feelings, you fat shit.”

  Hot, fetid air blows out of my mouth. “I’m not fat anymore,” I say. My head starts to throb and I suddenly realize that I’ve never really admitted that to myself before. I’m not fat anymore. I don’t know if I’m normal or not, too thin or still chunky. I don’t know anything other than I’m not fat.

  “I find that hard to believe,” he says. “But honestly, I don’t give two shits about you or your girth, King Kahn. You’ll always be a fat slob to me. Always and forever.”

  If I’ve learned anything from our brief interaction, I’ve learned that Tate Cole hasn’t changed at all. He’s sick and he’s mean, and being locked up has done nothing but make him worse, not better.

  “Stop it,” Marcy cries as she cradles the phone in her hand, probably wishing that she had the strength to crush it into little pieces, crushing Tate along with it.

  “No,” says Tate. “I’m having too much fun.”

  I slide around the overstocked kitchen island more quickly than I’ve probably ever moved and snatch the receiver out of Marcy’s hand.

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “Fun time’s over.” Then I press the red button and end the call. It’s not until the silence around all of us becomes deafening that I realize that I’m taking in big gluts of air like I’ve run the track at school, with pounds and pounds of fat jiggling all over me.

  Finally, I look up at Marcy and see something in her face that I’ve rarely seen in her until today.

  Anger.

  Her eyes are narrowed and there are little creases on her forehead and around her beautiful lips. She’s angrier than I’ve ever seen. Suddenly, I’m afraid that the virtual blade that Tate used on her moments ago is going to appear again, and Marcy is going to use it on Anders because he broke the kitchen cabinet.

  Instead, she hops off the counter, pushes me aside, and dashes into the living room where there’s a table overflowing with books and letters, paper, and stacks of coupons which are so foreign to all of us in Meadowfield that I’m surprised I even know what they are.

  With single-minded purpose she dives into the mess, clawing at the papers, throwing them this way and that until she is surrounded by a
storm of mail.

  Finally she stops. In her hand is a thin book, almost like a calendar.

  “What’s happening?” Myers sniffs.

  Anders says nothing. He’s still facing the split cabinet, his eyes closed, probably willing his world to come to an abrupt and immediate end.

  Meanwhile, Marcy begins rapidly flipping through the book she’s holding, finger-reading the pages like Helen Keller. Over and over again, she tears through the glossy paper while the rest of us are deathly quiet.

  Finally, she stops.

  “Damnit,” she whispers, as she stares at the page in front of her. “Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.” Marcy clutches the book to her chest and stares up at the ceiling. Tears flow again, like they’ve done a dozen times already today.

  It’s not until she shows us what she’s holding that we understand why.

  50

  DRUGS OR NO DRUGS, my head hurts.

  “I don’t understand,” says Myers. Why would he? He’s been off in a dreamland all afternoon.

  “Damnit,” breathes Marcy again. It’s about the only word she can manage to utter.

  Anders stands motionless with his eyes closed. I know him well enough to know that he is desperately looking for a calm center somewhere in the middle of all the madness. He needs to find it. If he doesn’t, rage might take over.

  As for me, my shoulders creep up to my ears. Every part of me is clenched so tightly that if I were to fart, I think only dogs would hear the high pitched whistle.

  I’m staring at a picture of Calista Diamond. She has crazy hair. Part of it is dyed that pale white-green color that is going to go in and out of style so quickly that no one will ever remember that it was a fashion to begin with. She also has thin, twine-like braids running down one side of her face.

  She looks like a mental, post-apocalyptic flower child, sitting at a cafeteria table with a bunch of other crazies.

  Her picture is glossy and printed in an over-the-top quarterly publication from The Bellingham School.

  What was it that the reporter said on television? ‘Eighteen-year-old Diamond is a resident of Bellingham, Massachusetts. No more is known about her in this developing story. Once again, we are live here in Meadowfield, Massachusetts where tragedy has struck this small New England community.’